IBM's absolute top-of-the-line mainframes today, in 2018, are binary-compatible with machines that were sold in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I have questions.

Why was it a reasonable cost to undertake for IBM to make sure that their spiffy new hardware was binary compatible for the benefit of a 40-plus-year-old codebase?

What code, written in 1970 and expected to run on hardware that peaked around 5 MIPS, actually needs to run on hardware that runs thirty times as fast (in 2000), or 300 times as fast (in 2017)?

Who needs 360 binary compatibility?

At what point does it become more cost effective to rewrite in C? Or to run in virtualization on a lot of cheaper hardware?

Enquiring minds, and all.

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Graydon Saunders: +Christopher Tate Why do you think there's ANY technical component to the decision making process?

Nothing about the process cares in any way about how; it cares about what, and "what" is "exactly the same (but faster)". No one will accept "equivalent" or "tested the same"; it has to be exactly the same. And since they started with optimized assembler on the bare metal so the 5 MIPS they had could make it through a day's transactions in 24 hours, that's what the future holds, too, and why "full hardware level binary compatibility" is the only way to answer "yes" to "exactly the same".

Jac Goudsmit: I imagine there might be military stuff running on this kind of hardware too. I work for a government contractor and I know that any sanity goes out the window when it comes to requirements for hardware and software security.

My company makes rackmount computers that are basically headless PC's with some custom hardware. A long time ago, we made a version of Windows Embedded especially for this hardware. It was rock-solid, and it would be pretty difficult to get it infected with malware unless that malware would be specifically written for our hardware and our setup.

We basically loaded Windows Embedded from a read-only RAM disk and whenever the system rebooted, it would restore itself to the state that we created when we wrapped it up. Also, it ran our software as the shell instead of Explorer, so even if you figured out how to connect a monitor and keyboard, you probably wouldn't be able to do anything with it. And if you would connect a monitor, keyboard and an external drive to boot from, you would only see some big binary files, so it would have been (arguably) fairly difficult to reverse-engineer.

But no, that wasn't acceptable anymore, because as it turns out, there's some regulation that operating systems on this kind of hardware have to be kept up to date, in a verifiable way. So we had system that didn't need to be connected to the Internet (where most malware comes from) and would be impervious to pretty much all malware because it would require physical access AND knowledge of the system to infect it. And now we had to start using a full version of Windows so it could be verifiably updated over the Internet.

And by the way, the software could probably be rewritten to run on much simpler hardware. But you don't just throw a 40+ man-year investment away.

David Tate: +Jac Goudsmit Not sure whether this is relevant, but I'll mention it anyway...

The Air Force decided in the late 1990s to replace the mission computer and mission software on the E-3 Sentry "AWACS" aircraft. I'll skip the extraneous details, but the final decision was to replace the hardware with new commercial hardware and operating systems (i.e. laptops and Linux), and to rewrite and improve the software while also moving to a modular open architecture.

The hardware being replaced was IBM System 4pi, a later derivative of the System 360 architecture, in a variant specialized for avionics. The same hardware has flown on the B-52 and (multiply redundant) on the Space Shuttle.

The hardware upgrade was easy and successful. Several new generations of upgrade have been accomplished since the original change. The software upgrade was much less successful; the new system is still (20 years after the original decision to upgrade) struggling to match the performance of the old system. So, no, rewriting the software to run on much simpler hardware is not a no-brainer.

Thomas Bridgewater: +David Tate I'm saying that men and women are different, yes. In our evolutionary history, men went out and explored and hunted and women stayed safe with the children. As such, men are more likely to create tools for hunting (meaning invent things) and to investigate nature (physics), and women are more likely to be nurturing, and will thus go into fields like biology, nursing and teaching. This is exactly what we see. Also, I never said that men were smarter, but just mentioned the variance. Both sexes have about the same IQ, but IQs of women are more clustered around the average and there are more idiot men and more genius men.

Black people and white people don't really have the same differences. The lack of black people in STEM will be attributed in fairly large part to black people being generally poorer than white people and having less education and STEM fields being high education and at least a decent background household income fields.

Christopher Tate: This innate difference is, of course, why girls do slightly better in Iceland's equivalent of the math SAT than boys do....

Thomas Bridgewater: +Christopher Tate That would be a combination of factors, like the standard school system favouring how girls learn or just their development over how boys learn/their development, and that teachers consistently mark down boys. Boys are more naturally physical and spatially oriented so sitting still for hours on end and reading problems to try and solve doesn't suit them, whereas girls are better with language and are less impulsive, allowing the current school system to work for them better. Then you've got the lack of male role models which doesn't help them. Also, from what I've seen, that difference actually reverts when you look at the higher end of education, as if the higher IQ children can power through these problems.

She's an ... indie alternative hip hop artist? Not my usual run of music, I must admit -- but I was taken unawares and absolutely blown away. I love love LOVE the way she turns phrases, and the quality of her delivery. Smart, clean, incisive, and a freaking gut punch when called for.

If nothing else, at least the quotes in this article provide a refreshing break from hypocrisy. The argument against hate-crimes laws which include sexual orientation is simple: these laws are a Trojan horse. If they prevent us from beating and killing people, next they'll prevent us from discriminating against them as well.

The "First Amendment Defense Act" (a bill just as disturbing as its faux-patriotic title implies) follows a similar vein: the idea is that discrimination against the LGBTQ community is such a fundamental tenet of people's religious faith that it requires special protection; no law must ever touch it. That bill doesn't even pretend at impartiality; it specifically lists which religious tenets it protects. Religions, or people, who don't agree receive no protection at all.

This is just a sample of the sort of vile world that men like Mike Pence and James Dobson [eliding the curses which go with their names] mean to create: one in which hatred is elevated to a holy value, and their sick parody of Christianity is a state religion.

I just had a Cree 75W-equivalent (13.5W actual, ~1100 lumens, 2700K color temperature) go bad. It's only about two years old, very far short of its alleged 25,000 hour lifespan. I am Not Pleased with the Cree brand now.

Astonishingly, places like Wirecutter / Sweethome seem to think that Cree are the pick of the current crop. This astonishes me. I'm guessing that nobody ever reviews for lifespan -- oops!

So what do you good gentlepeople recommend? I'm particularly looking for A19 [or, if necessary, A21] form factor, sunlight spectrum or similar. 3200K is probably the farthest up the color-temperature range that I'll consider; above that things start looking terribly blue/purple and glaring to me.

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Dor Kleiman (configurator): I had a few dozen bulbs die within half a year of installing them each. Eventually we found out the power for that line was unstable because a fridge was causing mini surges. We put a small device between the bulbs and the power source and since then haven't replaced any more lights.

Marco Nelissen: I've had a Cree bulb go bad too. I contacted Cree through their online support page and they sent me a new one. Haven't had any other Cree bulbs go bad so far, but they're all in places that don't see as much on time as the one that went bad.

This is so far into "what the fuck?" space that I have no idea what to even make of it. Cadillac was prepping a TV ad spot which would feature people from "all walks of life in America" who would be "standing together as a union."

The casting call which they sent out included a role for "alt-right (neo-Nazi)" principals, male or female, ages 20-40, of any ethnicity. It specified that they wanted "real alt-right thinkers!," not simply actors.

When people spotted this and started sharing the casting call on social media, the agency responded by removing the "(neo-Nazi)" part, but leaving the rest of the casting call as-is. This then got the attention of Cadillac, which promptly disavowed the ad in a Facebook post, and the casting agency now says that the person who wrote the listing has been sacked.

I won't try to guess who was actually responsible for this.

But I will file this under people feeling that Nazis are increasingly part of the legitimate spectrum of the American experience, the sort of people you would want to represent in a "rainbow of America." And if that part doesn't scare the hell out of you, nothing will.